Artist Talk
From Ollywiki
• Address the changing skins of the urban landscape: botanical (ethnobotanical), built, structural elements, cultural elements.
•intervention vs. instigation vs. identification?
Optical Subconscious, work becomes an environment of relationships of which I eventually become a very small part.
•My work doesn't really attempt to lock this process in, more just to initiate it or in some cases just to engage it appreciatively. (Reappropriate it?) My work often just becomes part of the optical subconscious.
•Ruderal ecologies. Can non-intervention in a context of constant intervention be considered art?
Lab Lands
•Touch on the interesting intellectual property implications of 'Healing the Cut-Bridging the Gap' </br> I'm not the sort of guy who cares about reappropriation of my work or the images of this work, yet the work has developed a social/ecological function, which I hae grown attached to. So the whole issue of deaccessioning becomes paramount in importance.</br> Rather long and arduous contract negotiations with the Cultural Affairs Office at the City of Vancouver, which delayed the project to the point where my initial collaborator, Janis Bowley, had to move to Australia, and exhausting my lawyer friend who was representing my sitution pro bono. Eventually a contract emerged which was somewhat acceptable to both parties and I began to implement the project. Interestingly, the fact that I wasn't an engineer or an expert in erosion control, never seemed to come up.</br>
•Artist as bandaid? Is that what I am?
Oliver Kellhammer's botanical interventions and public land art projects attempt to demonstrate nature's sometimes surprising ability to recover from damage.
His work facilitates the processes of regeneration by engaging the botanical and socio-political frameworks that underlie the landscape, taking such forms as small-scale urban eco-forestry, inner city community agriculture, and the restoration of eroded railway ravines. His work is anti-monumental: As his interventions integrate into the ecological and cultural communities that form around them, his role as artist becomes increasingly obscured. The work functions a kind of catalytic model-making, living on as a vehicle for community empowerment, while demonstrating methods of positive engagement with the global environmental crisis.
Most of his recent projects have focused on an area which roughly parallels the main railway corridor that runs through the eastern part of Vancouver, British Columbia. The surrounding neighbourhoods are historically low-income, with the lowest green space per capita ratios in the city. A significant portion of this landscape has been industrialized and the resulting disturbance has created extensive areas of ruderal (ruin) ecologies, from which the artist takes his inspiration.
[http://www.amazon.com/Relational-Aesthetics-Nicolas-Bourriaud/dp/2840660601/sr=8-1/qid=1166151071/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-8383182-5680121?ie=UTF8&s=books
Nicolas-Bourriaud book]
Nicolas Bourriaud wikipedia link
Bourriaud defines as ‘relational’ art which takes as its theoretical horizon ‘the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space’ (RA, p14). In other words, relational art seeks to establish inter-subjective encounters that literally take place – in the artist’s production of the work, or in the viewer’s reception of it – or which exist hypothetically, as a potential outcome of our encounter with a given piece. In relational art, meaning is said to be elaborated collectively (p18) rather than in the space of individual consumption. Relational art is thus conceived as the inverse of the privatised space of modernism as articulated differently by Clement Greenberg and Rosalind Krauss: rather than a discrete, portable, autonomous work of art that transcends its context, relational art beholden to the contingencies of its environment and audience. In some manifestations of this art, such as the performance-installations of Rirkrit Tiravanija, viewers are addressed as a social entity, and are even given the wherewithal to create a community, however provisional or utopian.
